The Port of Rotterdam Authority commissioned Fritz Haeg to produce some of his Animal Estates (most famously presented at the Whitney Museum Biennal in 2008). This short documentary about the port's fauna and flora accompanies the works.
The video is slow and grey and the Dutch sounds unenthusiastic, but this aesthetic emphasizes the industrial landscape's uneasy identity. Like Haeg's work, the short is a reflection about the relation animals and humans have with each other. At first some facts feel more humorous, such as the swans inhabiting the Port dangerously activating the container porter machinery or drunk thrushes in bushes, while others feel darker, like the decrease of Skylarks and their singing -- by 95% in the past decade in the Netherlands, -- or the arrival of fast reproducing rabbit colonies in the oil tanks' meadows (for more on the tragic rabbit-human relation check out myxomatosis)). But overall, all demonstrate how intertwined they are in the larger systems humans engineer.
In any case it seems like a great initiative!
The video is slow and grey and the Dutch sounds unenthusiastic, but this aesthetic emphasizes the industrial landscape's uneasy identity. Like Haeg's work, the short is a reflection about the relation animals and humans have with each other. At first some facts feel more humorous, such as the swans inhabiting the Port dangerously activating the container porter machinery or drunk thrushes in bushes, while others feel darker, like the decrease of Skylarks and their singing -- by 95% in the past decade in the Netherlands, -- or the arrival of fast reproducing rabbit colonies in the oil tanks' meadows (for more on the tragic rabbit-human relation check out myxomatosis)). But overall, all demonstrate how intertwined they are in the larger systems humans engineer.
In any case it seems like a great initiative!
